Advancements in computing and network technologies now enable users to browse different websites for information on various topics of interest, from almost any location using a web browser installed at a mobile or personal computing device of each user. Users generally are interested in browsing a number of different websites, whose having content that may change frequently and/or on a continuous basis. Examples of such websites include, but are not limited to, news sites, information pages related to a public or private organization, commercial product pages, financial market websites, and weblogs. However, users may find the amount of information available across many websites at any given time too overwhelming. Users may also find it difficult to stay current with the latest content changes publications or updates made to each site. While it may be possible for users to repeatedly check each website for any new content, this can be a very tedious and time-consuming process. Also, while some websites may provide an option to send electronic mail (e.g., e-mail) or other notifications of content updates, such notifications from multiple websites also may become overwhelming, e.g., as the number and frequency of content updates for each site increases.
To enable users to access the latest content from multiple websites in a relatively faster and more efficient way, a content provider or owner/operator of a website may publish the website's content as a syndicated feed (or “web feed”), to which other websites (or web services) and/or end users of the website may subscribe for viewing the content via a feed reader or aggregator program executable at the services' or users' respective devices. The content provider or website operator may utilize specialized software, such as a content management system, for publishing recent content (or articles) to the web feed in a standardized format that is also understood by feed reader programs.
Conventional content syndication formats, such as the Really Simple Syndication (RSS) format, provide a basic specification for representing different content items and metadata (e.g., title, body, category, author, publication date, etc.) related to each item included within an article published on a website. A published website article may include various types of content including, but not limited to, text, images, audio, video, and other types of digital multimedia content. As conventional syndication formats for web feeds generally are generally used to provide a summary or a simplified version of the full articles and content items published on a website, such conventional formats may not include support for all of the types of content items that may be included within a published article on a website.
For example, the standard specifications of conventional web feed formats generally fail to provide support for slideshow content associated with an article. Therefore, such standard specifications may not provide a way for content distributors or website operators to associate a slideshow or any related slideshow metadata with a corresponding website article. Consequently, users of feed reader or aggregator programs may not be able to view the full version of an article including a slideshow.
While some markup languages, such as HTML5, may provide options to include figures and captions for supporting a list of images or other types of multimedia content, the use of such a markup language may limit the types of content or data that can be represented for a slideshow or any individual slide. Further, such a markup language generally does not support the types of metadata that may be required for each content item, especially, for example, slideshows.